Whether or not you’ve seen the movie Sully, you’re probably asking yourself what the heck a movie about the “Miracle on the Hudson” has to do with climate change mania. Good question. Before I answer, though, this post is probably one giant spoiler, so if you haven’t read https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061924695/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=bookwormroom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0061924695&linkId=bc99de85539dae5478f4f7b8fda2d590 or seen the movie, you might want to stop reading about now.

If you’re wondering whether to see the movie, I thought it was pretty good, although I would have cut out all the close-ups of Tom Hanks’ emotion-bleeding eyes, and skipped all the useless parts with his wife. The good stuff came when Clint Eastwood, who directed, focused closely on the NTSB investigation to determine whether Sully made the right call in landing on the Hudson, rather than trying to reach one of the nearby airports.

[Last chance to skip spoilers.]

The movie’s tension came about because the NTSB’s computer simulations insisted that Sully could have landed safely at an airport rather than risked everyone’s life with a landing on the Hudson. This tension, by the way, is not just for dramatic effect. This was exactly what the NTSB claimed. In other words, the battle in this movie is reality versus a computer simulation.

As in real life, so it is in the movie: Sully proves that the computer simulations are wrong because they fail to factor in the precious seconds it took Sully and his co-pilot to realize that they had a huge problem and then to realize that the problem was one that emergency protocol couldn’t fix. Those seconds were the difference between safely reaching an airfield or landing on water.

Although I know it didn’t mean to be, for me the movie turned into a giant climate change analogy. The Left’s obsession with climate change didn’t arise from actual climate change. Instead, the genesis for the climate change apocalypse was computer generated simulations — simulations, moreover, that dealt with potential future facts infinitely more complex and variable than those applicable to an airplane accident that had already happened.

Just as the NTSB was loath to accept reality when it conflicted with its computer models, so too is the Left resolutely blind to the climate facts on the ground (and up in the sun) that conflict with computer models. To them, the models are the reality, and the endless evidence showing that real events do not support the models is a fantasy that they must deny.

As I said, despite his conservative bona fides, I don’t believe that Eastwood intended in any way to make a movie that is a metaphor for the climate wars. Still, that’s what he managed to do. So if you ever find yourself in an argument with a Lefty about those computer simulations, you might take the time to treat him to a showing of Sully. Maybe he’ll learn a good lesson from a decent movie.

Unusually for me, I saw a first-run movie tonight. It was, as you’ve already realized, American Sniper. Also unusually, the Century Cinema, which is Marin’s premiere movie theater, with a big screen and a George Lucas-installed sound system, had an almost completely packed house on the second weekend of a January movie. One expects packed houses for the first week or two of a Star Wars or Harry Potter franchise movie during the summer, but it just never happens for any other type of movie, especially in January. Never. And for the first time in my admittedly experience seeing a movie in Marin, about half the theater broke into applause when the movie ended. Marin’s conservatives are creeping out from undercover to see this one.

Not being a professional movie reviewer, I’m not quite sure where to begin with this one. You already know the story: Texas good ol’ boy Chris Kyle leaves the rodeo circuit, joins the Navy, becomes a SEAL, and heads off to Iraq, where he becomes a legend as the most successful sniper in American military history. After four tours of duty, he returns home and begins helping vets who suffered physical or emotional injuries during the war (or, of course, both). One of those vets, a Marine, murders both him and a neighbor, Chad Littlefield. Throughout it all, Kyle and his wife love and fight and love some more, and have two children who make both of them proud. It’s a simple story, really.

When Chris Kyle died, America mourned. His funeral cortege and memorial service drew thousands of people, although his former Commander-in-Chief (and still current Commander-in-Chief of the American military) was never heard to mention Kyle’s name. I guess Kyle just didn’t look enough like the son Obama never had — although it seems that Hugo Chavez, Whitney Houston, Robin Williams, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown did look like that son, at least if one is to judge by the encomiums Obama poured upon them and the representatives he sent to the hoodlums’, er sons’ funerals.

Unlike me, Clint Eastwood’s film is carefully apolitical. It keeps a very tight focus on one man and the people around him. Just as they were in Kyle’s autobiography, his family by blood and marriage vie for first place in his heart with his SEAL family. Kyle is enormously patriotic. He’s repulsed by the sadism and immorality he sees amongst the Iraqis he fights. He lives to protect his fellow servicemen. And he has troubles transitioning rapidly between war in Iraq and peace at home.

In this regard — the profound disconnect between wartime on Monday and peace on Tuesday — Kyle’s situation reminded me strongly of British WWI fighters who also made almost painfully rapid transitions between home and war. Just as Kyle talks on the phone with his wife while sniping on a rooftop, British troops sometimes received by the afternoon post the mail their loved ones had sent that morning. (For other interesting similarities and differences between the British experience in WWI and the American experience in Iraq, I recommend this book.

To the extent I notice a director’s touch, Eastwood’s was deft and sure. Those two simple words count as high praise from me. I usually notice the director’s role in a movie when I hate the movie because of the director’s bizarre, irritating, or offensive decisions. Eastwood makes none of those mistakes. His style is smooth, professional and, when it comes to the fighting scenes, incredibly dynamic, while still being coherent enough to keep the audience engaged.

What really makes the movie, though, is Bradley Cooper’s incredible acting. “Acting” actually seems like the wrong word. Cooper doesn’t “act” Chris Kyle; he “is” Chris Kyle. Admittedly, I’ve never met Chris Kyle, so I’m taking a leap of faith by saying what I did. What I really mean is that Cooper inhabits his character’s skin so seamlessly that there is never, ever a sense that Cooper is acting at all. This is a fully realized character. One has no sense of the actor named Bradley Cooper positioning himself on the set and then, when he hears the word “action!” going through the motions of the character named Chris Kyle. There is no actor named Bradley Cooper. There is just Chris Kyle.

One of the things that makes it clear just how extraordinarily Cooper fills the role is to watch the other actors. They’re all good . . . but you can see them acting. I have a vague memory of having seen Cooper in some other roles and not noticing him. He apparently was waiting for this role.

All in all, American Sniper is a movie that deserves its accolades and blockbuster revenue. Chris Kyle was one of those great, salt-if-the-earth Americans who emerges in times of war — not a man who loves killing for killing’s sake, which would make him no better than the enemy, but a true sheepdog who is willing to get dirty in the fight to protect his flock. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, and the rest of the American Sniper paid Kyle his due by creating this great movie.

Although, come to think of it, I’m not really going to write about American Sniper at all. Instead, I’m going to write about some of the reactions to American Sniper, which function as a Rorschach test of American (and, dare I say, un-American?) values.

I have to begin with the fundamental premise, one that drives the Left nuts, which is that Clint Eastwood, with help from a superb Bradley Cooper, has directed an incredibly good movie, one that doesn’t shy away from war’s ugliness, but that acknowledges, not just the physical bravery of our men, but also their moral decency. As I try endlessly to explain to anybody who can listen, both good guys and bad guys kill. After all, no one will deny that a woman has acted bravely and honorably if she shoots to death the man trying to kill her child. Likewise, only sadistic psychopaths will applaud the broken bodies of Christians, Jews, women, children, gays, blacks, and the “wrong” kind of Muslims that ISIS, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and other Islamic Jihad organizations leave in their wake.

Let me fall back here on my already wordy poster, one that’s targeted at the buffoonish Seth Rogen, but that addresses the larger issue, which is that why one kills matters as much as the fact that one does kill:

(I also won’t waste time in this post correcting the innumerable personal slurs the Left is now hurling at Chris Kyle, most of which are based upon a failure either to see the movie or read the book. Ian Tuttle, thankfully, takes care of setting that record straight.)

Mentioning Seth Rogen, though, leads me nicely back to the point I want to make in this post, which is an observation I first made to my friends on the Watcher’s Council: namely, that American Sniper has been remarkably effective at flushing weasels out from under cover, proving that good art frequently has multiple virtues. For example, one of my neighbors, a nice, but rather brittle, angry woman, whose life has not treated her with the generosity she was raised to expect, posted the following image on Facebook:

Doesn’t that ugly, mean-spirited poster sum up just about everything that’s wrong with the Leftist view of the world? The wrongness of it all begins with the terrible slur against Kyle and all the other American troops who have fought against the same type of men who are now crucifying, raping, beheading, and generally rampaging their way across the Middle East, with occasional detours into Europe. I know those men. My Dad was one.

Really, there’s no sugar-coating it. For five years of his life, my Dad was a hate-filled killer. He poured his energy, brains, skill, and courage into slaughtering as many people as he possibly could. If he could have killed more, he would have.

In case you’re wondering, Daddy wasn’t Dexter or Charles Manson or Stalin. Instead, he was an ordinary foot soldier in WWII, fighting with the RAF and ANZAC in the Mediterranean theater.

During all those years of fighting, mostly in North Africa with detours into Greece and Crete, Daddy wasn’t glorying in slaughter for the thrill of it. He didn’t kill to slake blood lust or because he was a racist. In fact, quite the opposite. He was killing because he understood the stakes, which was to stop the spread of genocidal racism: If he didn’t do his bit to halt the Nazis in North Africa, those same Nazis would descend on Palestine, and with the help of the enthusiastic ancestors of today’s ISIS, have slaughtered where they stood every Jewish man, woman, and child in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Chris Kyle and his comrades, as Kyle made clear in his book, didn’t kill Iraqis because they took a sadistic glee in a human turkey shoot. They killed specific Iraqis who were bound and determined to kill the Americans (which is ground enough to want to kill the Iraqis first) and, moreover, who were equally bound and determined to put into place precisely the ideological governance we now see in the Middle East with ISIS and in Nigeria with Boko Haram.

Ultimately, Kyle and his comrades were killing humans fatally infected with a deadly ideological disease. These men understood (and, wherever they still fight, understand) that people infected with genocidal, imperialist, tyrannical values need to be exterminated just as surely as we kill a rabid dog or, 70 years ago, as we killed rabid Nazis. Unfortunately, the reality of war is that, when we kill the guilty, we sometimes kill the innocent. My Dad knew that, amongst the Nazis he was fighting were ordinary Germans who were forced by circumstances to fight for those same rabid Nazis.

Knowing that didn’t stop Daddy, or any of the other Allied troops. They understood that this is how the world works. (For more of my thoughts on that specific topic, you can check out my annual Passover post.) As Daddy once said, you cannot fight a war if you don’t hate your enemy — by which he meant if you don’t hate the values your enemy seeks to advance.

So, clearly, one level of Leftist stupidity is its members’ complete inability to understand that soldiers can hate the ideology without doing the Leftist thing and turning everything into some agonized Greek tragedy about racism, sexism, homophobia, and third world victimization. Smart people are able to winnow out good from bad, and they know in which directions to aim their guns.

But there’s a second level of stupidity at work in that ugly, mean-spirited poster, and that’s the stupidity that is unable to comprehend that, without the sheepdogs, the sheep aren’t able to go around sweetly and smugly ministering to the less fortunate among them. Please believe me that I don’t intend to be snide about charity. I think charity is a wonderful thing, provided that it’s not forced upon people through government coercion. It’s one thing for me, while exercising my values, to donate my time, money, and labor to aid those less fortunate than I. It’s another thing entirely when the government, with a gun aimed at my head, announces that I’ve volunteered to donate 50% of my annual income to help those that the government deems should be recipients of government beneficence.

Putting aside my irritation at a government that denies me the opportunity to redistribute my own wealth, let me get to the real issue and the real stupidity behind that poster: There is no charity when there is no civil society. Charity works when society is sufficiently stable, free, and predictable that people can actually earn and keep money — and then give it away if they want to. A strong, infrastructure underlying a free, market-based society creates both extra time and extra wealth, not to mention a capacity for empathy that is utterly lacking when people are suffering under either complete anarchy or sadistic, malevolent totalitarian rule.

You, my dear, smug Leftists, are able to boast in self-aggrandizing tones about your ability to shake down hard-working citizens only because men like Chris Kyle are willing to do the dirty work of keeping both tyrants and anarchy at bay. You’re like the person who dines in style on the steak, but sneeringly describes as a hillbilly the rancher who raised that cow and as a murderer the butcher who got that lovely filet mignon to your table.

Great art not only opens our minds, but it enable us to see with clarity those minds that cannot and will not open. People who value freedom understand that there’s a price to pay for freedom’s blessings and we are appropriately and eternally grateful to those who are willing to do the dirty work that goes with paying that price.

Radical, jihadist, fundamentalist Islam (or whatever other nouns and adjectives you wish to apply to the 10% of the world’s Muslims who seek only to destroy) must be destroyed, lest we are all destroyed. My problem is that I’m a tiny middle-aged Jewish woman, who is a great target, but a lousy fighter. I live because Chris Kyle, and the SEALS, and the Marines, and the Navy, and the Army, and the Air Force put themselves in front of me, as a living barrier protecting me from the abyss.

I pity those people who don’t appreciate the gift they’ve been given, and do nothing more than set themselves up as the socialist twins to those murderous Islamists that the Kyle’s of this world fight. Because, really, once you strip away those smug words about the personal virtues of government funded charity, you discover that the Left and the Islamists are pretty much the same people. It’s just that the Islamists have gone further down the path necessary to achieve their ultimate ends:

Practically from Day 1 of Obama’s presidency, I’ve been calling him a pathological, or clinical, or malignant narcissist.

There’s no there there, I said. This is an empty man whose only goal is self-aggrandizement to fill the black hole that exists where a healthy person would have a functioning ego.

There’s a compulsive liar there, I said, one who will always say whatever he needs to say to protect himself from being forced to look into that psychic black hole at any given moment.

There’s a vicious person there, I pointed out, when who will denigrate anyone and everyone, and jettison all his friends, so long as he can continue to assure himself that he’s better than everyone else — since he knows deep inside that the reality is an empty psychic space where a healthy ego would normally be found.

There’s a master manipulator there, I noted, a person who, lacking normal emotional responses, is nevertheless adept at analyzing and manipulating other people’s emotions for his own benefit.

There is a dangerous, empty, vicious man there, I said.

Clint Eastwood said it too, when he addressed an empty chair at the RNC. His used a visual to bring life to the notion that there’s no there there. Obama is indeed a black hole, an empty suit, a little man, a narcissist. In an office environment, he would be the boss everyone hates and the colleague everyone learns to distrust. But as the head of a nation, he’s very, very dangerous.

Bill Whittle gets it too, as he spells out Obama’s emptiness in one of his more masterful videos:

Yesterday, my sister emailed me a “cheer up” email that’s making the rounds. It’s intended for women, who tend to feel more strongly than men do that the mirror is their enemy. The tag line is “It isn’t just us who suffer changes over the years!” The rest of the email is photos of former male sex symbols in their prime and now. Here, see for yourself:

Val Kilmer

Mickey Rourke

Russel Crowe

Brendan Fraser

Alec Baldwin

Pierce Brosnan

Richard Gere

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Roger Moore

Clint Eastwood

Rod Stewart

I wasn’t amused by these photos nor did I have a pleasant frisson of schadenfreude. Instead, I was saddened. Age is cruel. Maybe I’m more aware of that right now than I would have been otherwise because of my mother’s health issues. A certain part of my memory has her locked into place as a fresh, vital, energetic, extremely pretty woman, about the age I am now. But the lady I’m dealing with today is so very, very different: she’s fragile, shrunken, wrinkled, sad, and tired. She’s still my mother, and I love her, but she also feels like a stranger to me.

Famous people, the ones who had their gorgeous youth played out in the spotlight, have an exceptionally sad fate when they age: We laugh at them. People delight in the fact that the same people who used to make them feel inferior are now suffering the same fate as everyone else. Unless you want to take the punk rocker advice of “die young, stay pretty,” age will lay its hands upon you.

The Santorum yearbook photo demonstrates that aging is a process that places its benefits and burdens on different people at different times. For those who didn’t peak young, age can be a blessing. Rick Santorum is a very nice looking man. He doesn’t make my heart beat faster (that privilege is reserved for Keanu) but I do think that, for a guy in the middle of middle age, he’s got nothing to be embarrassed about.

For the MSM, Santorum’s ordinary good guy looks are a problem. Fortunately, help is on the way in the form of a yearbook picture that isn’t very flattering, unless you’re a fan of Napoleon Dynamite:

Rick Santorum high school picture

Rick’s features are good, but the disco design shirt, the wide lapels, the huge square glasses, and the bowl haircut (complete with sideburns) are, well, in a word “dorky.” At The Atlantic, you can feel the thrill of excitement:

A quick office straw poll here at The Atlantic, conducted amidst uproarious laughter, confirms that this is, in fact, the single worst year book photo that most of us have ever seen. An outright disaster. I suppose it’s Santorum’s misfortune to have been in high school during this era. I’m pretty sure that 1976 wasn’t too kind to anyone. But still. Wow–he looks like McLovin in polyester. I have yet to meet the political consultant talented enough to spin this one. My condolences to Santorum. Brave of him to have struggled through this and made something of this life.

The Atlantic includes yearbook pictures of the other Republican candidates at the same link. Mitt was good-looking then, and he’s good-looking now, but everyone else has changed. They all look young, they all look very much like products of their own time period, and in all of them, in the smile, the eyes, and the bone-structure, you can see the adults they would become. Some have improved, some have just aged. Again, rather than feeling smug when I look at them, I’m simply awed by Time’s power.

Let’s face it, yearbook photos suck. They just do. They’re a snapshot of a moment, and usually not a great moment. I think everyone tries to do the best they can.

In the interests of fairness, The Anchoress includes at her post high school (and college) pictures of the past Democrat candidates. Obama looks like an extra in Kentucky Fried Movie; John Kerry looks as if he was auditioning for the part of Lurch in the Addams Family, except that he overacted and lost the part; and Al Gore looks pompous (so I guess some things never change). Mostly, they look young, and they look like their peers. That’s life — and to savage a candidate or even a movie star, because he looked bad then or looks bad now is, as The Anchoress says, “high schoolish.”

As for me, unlike The Anchoress, I will not include a photo of myself here (and hers is much prettier than she would give you to believe). Aside from my commitment to my anonymity, I am notorious for shying away from cameras. I don’t take pictures, I don’t like having my picture taken, and, when pictures of me exist, I don’t spread them around.